The one thing that gave him pause was to see that the mass of men did not agree with this view and never had agreed with it; they continued to live as if life were a good thing and one that had meaning. He turned his attention once more to the labouring classes whom he had always loved, and perceived that they held the true solution. He could not class them among those who failed to understand it, for they put it before themselves with quite extraordinary clearness; still less were they among the Epicureans, for their lives were rough, hard, and laborious; neither did they seek the solution in self-murder, for they looked upon that as the greatest of evils. Where, then, lay their secret? He answered: "In their religion." The peasantry were not like the upper classes; their religion was not for them a convention, but they really lived according to its teachings. "Their whole lives were passed in heavy labour and unrepining content ... they accepted illness and sorrow in the quiet and firm conviction that all was for the best ... thousands and millions had so understood the meaning of life that they were able both to live and to die." Tolstoy sought, passionately and despairingly, to gain this faith; he conformed to all the ceremonial requirements of the Greek Church, prayed morning and evening, fasted and prepared for the Communion; he took a pleasure in sacrificing his bodily comfort by kneeling, by rising to attend early service; he took a pleasure also in mortifying his intellectual pride by forcing himself to believe doctrines which he had formerly condemned. At the same time his invincible intellectual honesty {71} remained with him and tortured him. Thus when he took the Communion, he tried hard to persuade himself that it meant only a cleansing from sin and a complete acceptance of Christ's teaching. "But when I drew near to the altar, and the priest called upon me to repeat that I believed that what I was about to swallow was the real body and blood, I felt a sharp pain at the heart; it was no unconsidered word, it was the hard demand of one who could never have known what faith was ... knowing what awaited me I could never go again." The same invincible intellectual honesty made Tolstoy search into the whole teaching of the Church; he saw that its faith was irrational and merely a tradition, not the staff of life. He found the Orthodox Church more and more opposed to what he believed: it conducted persecutions, sanctioned massacres, and blessed war. He was obliged to break with it. Once more and with humility he turned to the Gospels themselves; he drew from them what seemed to him the real essence of the Christian religion; from them and from the life of the common man--the Russian muzhik--he made up his own creed and lived as has been described.